Here's your guide to Chittenden County's top beer bars

From Burlington to Richmond and point in between, here are nine great spots to sample the best beer in Vermont.
BRENT HALLENBECK/FREE PRESS

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Vermont is the most bartender-friendly state, according to a recent study by Zippia. The average annual salary is $29,530, with experienced workers earning as much as $48,490.(Photo: GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS)Buy Photo

Beer-loving Vermonters are proud that their state is famous for producing some of the most-highly-regarded brews in the world, from Heady Topper to Hill Farmstead. It’s hard to beat sitting at home with a Vermont-made IPA or sour beer and savoring the local flavor.

Unless, of course, you go out to savor that flavor. That way you get to taste a great local, regional, national or international beer and soak up some ambiance while you’re at it.

Chittenden County boasts a slew of bars where beer is big. I checked with local beer-industry experts, online beer-rating forums and my own “research” to determine the best beer bars in the county. We’re talking bars only, ones with a deep and well-curated roster of brews, not breweries that specialize in their own beers. Consider this list a starting nine; there are plenty of other fine beer-intensive spots in Vermont’s population center beyond these. Let’s go alphabetically, shall we?

The Archives

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Beer and video games await at The Archives in Burlington.(Photo: BRENT HALLENBECK/FREE PRESS)

This arcade bar is all about nostalgia. College students spend plenty of time drinking beer and playing video games, and you can relive your glory days and do both here.

It’s also about nostalgia for me because it’s the former location of the Burlington Free Press before our offices moved to 100 Bank St. I spent part of my Thursday night last week sipping a brew and playing Asteroids, like I might have done in college skatey-eight years ago, only this time in what was once Free Press circulation offices.

I perused a two-page beer menu, ordered a nice saison from Good Measure Brewing in Northfield, bought $3 worth of video-game tokens and went to work blasting asteroids as old-school hip-hop played in the background. Turned out I was more of the blastee than the blaster. My reflexes aren’t what they used to be, and the first few sips of beer had nothing to do with that.

At least the beer at The Archives is better than the stuff I was drinking in college. I resisted the temptation to cash in a fiver for more tokens and rested at a table in the old circulation office with my saison and the thumping sounds of the Beastie Boys.

This hugely popular Burlington spot has a busy, pleasant dining room but stands out for its two perfect seasonal spaces. There’s a chill summer patio out back that’s just a wee bit too chill for mid-February, so after work in the midst of Sunday’s snow storm I walked two minutes from the office and went straight downstairs to the Farmhouse’s dark, cozy tavern.

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A cold lager and a warm fire at The Farmhouse Tap & Grill in Burlington.(Photo: BRENT HALLENBECK/FREE PRESS)

That space has a fireplace and 30-brew tap list, all I needed to feel warm on a winter’s night. Every table and most barstools were occupied. Clearly I wasn’t the only one craving company on such a nasty weather day. (Maybe we were all just seeking body heat.)

This was Burlington’s biggest snowstorm in years, so I rode the alpine theme and ordered a Von Trapp Vienna Style Lager. The amber brew presented itself well with a creamy head and refreshing flavor – a lot of Stowe, a little Austria, a little Burlington and a lot of relaxation before my snowy drive home.

Finnigan’s is your classic local watering hole, one populated by way more Vermont lifers than transient college students. It’s often crowded, but when it’s not this pub feels like a dimmer, dingier version of the roomy Cheers bar Norm used to stroll into in TV-land Boston every week in the 1980s.

Doesn’t sound extraordinary, does it? Take a gander at the beer list, though. I stopped in Monday evening, read the chalkboard brew roster and felt my thirst growing with each name. I found Vermont beers a-plenty (Hermit Thrush sour IPA, Fiddlehead IPA, Switchback ale, Zero Gravity Green State Lager and Lost Nation’s gose included). Brewers from outside the state are well represented, from Lagunitas to Stone to Founders. If it’s tried-and-true you want, Finnigan’s has your Guinness and PBR.

I’ll happily sip a great beer in a fancy, gentrified bar. Come up with an under-the-radar place like this, though, where you can choose from a tap list of 17 and actually feel comfortable while drinking it, and I’m there.

This beer haven moved last year from a hidden mini-mall location in South Burlington to Main Street in Burlington. It’s a cool concept: Provide 18 taps with a wide variety of brews and, rather than just dole them out one pint at a time, put them in 64-ounce jugs (aka growlers) that beer lovers can take home.

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A lighted board lets customers at The Growler Garage in Burlington know which beers are on tap.(Photo: BRENT HALLENBECK/FREE PRESS)

On Tuesday’s list eight of the 18 brews were India Pale Ales or double IPAs. I was in the mood for something darker and heartier, so I veered from my typical Vermont-beer inclination toward something I was unfamiliar with, a porter called Peanut Butter Raincloud by Foolproof Brewing of Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

This was Tuesday night, which was also Valentine’s Day. On the way home I stopped to pick up some flowers for my wife and came in the door with the tulips and the growler filled with porter. I’m not sure which she appreciated more.

This Richmond eatery balances food and beer adeptly. Last summer, when my wife and I stopped in for coffee, I looked at the menu and knew after seeing two of my favorite things – fried chicken and a 16-tap beer list – that we’d be back.

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Beer flows from most of the 24 taps at Hatchet Tap and Table in Richmond, but a few are reserved for cider and wine. A perfect pair for the cheeseburger with special sauce and fries.(Photo: RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS FILE)

The fried chicken was indeed delicious, as was Hill Farmstead’s George brown ale that we both enjoyed. Hatchet is a warm, convivial place with a woody, ski-lodge atmosphere spruced up with a modern dangling globe lights. We sat near huge picture windows with a clear view out onto Bridge Street and watched the crowds descend on the place as the sun went down.

It seemed to be an après-ski bunch from Bolton Valley and Cochrans, with several families hanging out by the shuffleboard table or settling in at the chunky wooden dining tables. The new album by The xx, which we had just been listening to in the car on the way over, played on the sound system. It felt so much like home that after dinner we adjourned to the bar to dig further into that beer list.

I didn’t have the chance to stop for a beer Monday – I had to go back to the office and write a story with a clear head – but I did pick up a delicious chicken-parm sandwich that I ate at my desk. Had I stayed for beer, which I’ve enjoyed previously at this long-standing spot at the corner of Main and Church streets, I would have had plenty of good choices.

The 20 brews listed on the board Monday, much like at Finnigan’s Pub, run the gamut from Pabst Blue Ribbon to Magic Hat, Switchback and Fiddlehead. More unexpected possibilities caught my eye for a future pint stop; maybe the Good Measure Yesterday’s Tomorrow, which combines several varieties in an intriguing-sounding American farmhouse wheat IPA, or an imperial stout called Bomb! by Prairie Artisan Ales of Oklahoma that packs a substantial 13-percent alcohol by volume punch.

That sounds like the right accompaniment for my next chicken-parm sandwich.

This local chain began in Montpelier before spreading to three Chittenden County locations: Colchester, Essex and the one I semi-frequent in Williston. On a rare mid-week day off this month I happened to be running errands in Taft Corners and just happened to be near McGillicuddy’s around lunch time and just happened to stop in and drool over its always-impressive beer list.

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General Manager Todd Balcom pulls a pale ale from Goodwater Brewery from the extensive tap options at McGillicudy's at Maple Tree Place in Williston. Balsom's beer selections offer a wide variety of craft brews, some very hard to get, like the Founders Witchcraft Baltic Porter. Only two kegs of it exist in Vermont. (Photo: RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS)

The tomato-basil bisque I had for lunch was tasty, and the beer list made for great reading. I selected a fine dunkelweizen (those dark German-styled beers are hard to find around here) made by Base Camp Brewing in Portland, Oregon. I could have chosen from 27 other beers from Vermont, Maine, California, New York, Maryland, Quebec and various other points in North America.

Maybe my favorite thing about the beer list at McGillicuddy’s is that it doesn’t just rest on its laurels. There’s always a “coming soon” chart that entice you back for another visit. That Unibroue A Tout Le Monde farmhouse ale might just lure me back to run more “errands” in Taft Corners.

My wife and I both put in long, late days at work Monday, so it seemed the perfect capper to end the day by meeting for a brew or two in Winooski. Mule Bar has a nice selection of draft beers, and we had plenty of Vermonty options in front of us.

Hill Farmstead is often our go-to, and my wife chose the world-renowned Greensboro brewery’s saison porter. I tried a beer from Vermont brewery I hadn’t sampled yet, Hogback Mountain Brewing in Bristol. The sour gose tempered with sweet blood orange was the perfect way to recover after a long, stressful day.

My favorite seat at Mule Bar is at the window. Pedestrians who just wrapped up dinner down the street at Tiny Thai strolled by while cars on this post-snowstorm night tried to navigate the ever-challenging Winooski traffic circle/parallelogram. We each ordered a second Vermont beer – a Hill Farmstead Shirley Mae porter for my wife and a Foley Brothers pale ale for me – and gazed contentedly at the lights of the Champlain Mill and the snow-covered landscape of the pretty little city of Winooski.

More errands at Taft Corners means more beer. My wife and I had lunch Saturday at the Vermont Tap House, a family-friendly place that makes pizza in a brick oven and offers 28 brews on tap. (There’s a second Vermont Tap House down south in Rutland.)

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A pair of Edward pale ales by Hill Farmstead wait to be consumed at the Vermont Tap House in Williston.(Photo: BRENT HALLENBECK/FREE PRESS)

As I found a few nights later at The Growler Garage, this list was IPA-heavy – I know it’s more or less the official state beer of Vermont, but more than half of the brews on the list were IPAs or pale ales, and there were no brown or red ales as I might have selected. Not a hardship, though, when Hill Farmstead is on tap and they make Edward, one of the best pale ales ever, which we both chose.

My wife enjoyed her Cobb salad, I had a good Hawaiian pizza and we had trouble imagining a better way to spend an hour on a mid-winter Saturday afternoon. In the Chittenden County shopping Mecca of Taft Corners, the Vermont Tap House offers a nice respite.